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The raven watching, helpless, as the Authority bound me. My final command. The severing of our connection. The tower closing.

Then movement, endless flights across desert and mountain, searching for allies who might help free me. But no one could see it for what it was. No one could hear. It was form without identity. Substance mistaken for omen.

Countless attempts to breach the tower’s defenses, each one ending in failure. The Authority’s purges escalating. Veinbloods hunted, exposed, erased. And without me, no one left to shield them.

Until eventually, it faded from sight, endured the silence, became a myth.

A cry breaks free—not a human sound, but void given voice. Darkness rips outward from my kneeling form as the familiar resumes its place within me. The ground beneath me freezes, frost patterns lacing the stone in intricate whorls as cold fire continues to surge through my body.

It seeps inward, tracing through veins, threading along bone.

No longer foreign, no longer separate. It marks me—lines that rise like ink under pressure, shapes that shift, then settle.

What might seem like tattoos are nothing so fixed.

They move. They breathe. They map themselves across my chest, down my arms, along my spine—living force returning to where it belongs.

The emptiness disappears. Weight takes its place. Presence. Totality . Where there was fractured awareness, now exists perfect unity. Where power hesitated, now it obeys without resistance.

I remain kneeling, panting with the force of return, and allow myself this moment of vulnerability that no one will ever witness. My familiar’s consciousness merges with mine. Two halves aligning, memories coalescing, nothing lost between us.

When I finally rise, I do so with nothing withheld. It stirs beneath the surface—attentive, aligned, waiting for command. But more than that, through my familiar, I see from above. I feel the world from altitude. Currents. Movement. Threads of heat and intent. The shape of danger before it arrives.

I send the raven out. It bursts from my chest, fully formed, wings silent as it climbs into the night sky. Its vision threads back to me as it flies.

I am no longer alone in my body. And I am not only on the ground.

Nocturnal creatures move through the foothills, following jagged, uncertain hunting patterns.

Further off, the nomad settlement continues its evening rituals, its people gathering around fires that flicker like distant pinpricks of light.

There’s an Authority patrol camped for the night near the desert’s edge. Eight soldiers with sandstriders. All but one is asleep. None are aware that the thing they sealed away now moves through the dark less than two miles from their fire.

They don’t see me. And if I willed it, I could stop their hearts, one by one, leaving only cooling bodies for the desert scavengers to find at dawn, so they would not see anything again.

I test the limits of my restored power, drawing force from increasingly distant sources. They respond without delay, streaming toward me like current down a slope, shaping themselves at the slightest shift in thought. The dark does not just gather. It listens .

The night twists at my command, shaping into a crown of thorns, a blade, a ring. Each form hovers for two beats of my heart before dissolving. Power coils through me, alive now. There is no resistance. No delay. With the return of my familiar, I am almost complete.

The Authority believes they’ve neutralized me permanently. To them, I am already gone. Forgotten. Left in the past.

They don’t know I walk free. That my familiar has returned. That the power they buried is moving again, and it answers only to me.

They don’t understand the extent of the mistake they made. Not yet.

But the one who betrayed me, if he’s still alive, his days are numbered.

I call the raven back to me. It becomes a dark tattoo against my skin. The inky shape moving across my body like a living shadow—appearing on my forearm one moment, then my shoulder the next, never settling in one place for long. Always watching, always moving.

I push to my feet, and walk slowly back to the shelter, moving silently across ground that would challenge others without sunlight to guide their way.

Every step draws more of what they thought they’d broken back to me. Every breath sharpens what they failed to kill.

Ellie is still sleeping when I return to our camp, curled on her side, one hand tucked beneath her cheek. Completely unaware of what has changed.

With my newly unlocked powers, I study her, and what I see stops me mid-step.

There’s something there. Not magic as I recognize it, but a resonance that aligns with mine in a way that shouldn’t be possible. Not for someone without ability. Especially not someone from another world entirely .

My familiar stirs, its attention drawn to her. Its thoughts curl into mine, amplifying questions I haven’t yet been able to answer.

What is she? Why does she resonate with our magic? What role will she play in what comes next?

I reinforce the shadows around our shelter, darkness flowing from my hands freely now, layering into a boundary that will warn me of any approach. With my familiar restored, holding the wards costs nothing. I could sleep, if I chose.

Tomorrow we will reach Ravencross. If any trace of my network survived the purge, I’ll find it. But what matters most has already returned to me.

Ellie makes a soft sound behind me, and I turn to watch as she draws her legs up against her chest.

Tomorrow, she’ll notice the difference in me. She’ll have questions.

For now, in this moment of reintegration, I allow myself something I haven’t felt in a long time.

Anticipation.